callieami

[callieami]

Reference to new future blogs (will be updated when applicable)

[callieami]

making an outdoor landscape, finishing the house, Easter-eggs, and the ending finally done

This last week of the project, I focused my work on the outdoor environment around the house, and with a combo of the neighborhood pack, a small landscape, a tree set from Edith Finch and some grass from my original landscape test, we had a lovely environment surrounding the house.

To prevent the edge of the map from being obvious, I built up some barriers and landscape around the edges and added invisible walls around them to prevent players getting through. Shown here are the invisible walls made visible to illustrate the explorable space given to the player.

At this point I also added a title screen through a widget, which looks quite lovely.

After this, work on the house interior finally began to wrap up, with more items, clutter and visuals. at this point I also added a number of Easter-eggs about, most notably the silhouette of the Finch house in the distance, which is wonderfully framed though this window.

there are more Easter-eggs out the windows and in places like paintings but you'll have to find those yourself. With all this out of the way I could finally devote all my attentions to designing the Spare Room, where the game ends. The main idea of this is the twist that the spare room has been partially but not yet fully converted to a nursery room for a baby, so it came out okay, but it could be better and is a product of time constraints.

With the room complete and some story notes/letters written, I then had to construct an ending mechanic. I got around this in 30 Minutes with Charlene by using a trigger volume to activate an ending widget after 30 seconds, but to add more player freedom, I instead attached this ending to a new item, BP_EndScreenObject, which is a combination of BP_AudioObject and some code in the level blueprint which creates an item (in this case a Smartphone) that creates sound to attract the player until it is interacted with, which brings up an ending slide widget which pauses the game (also yes the game is now called Returning)

[callieami]

more house development, the full Finch house, expanding to the street, and yet another story game becoming relevant

At the beginning of this week, I finally gained access to the rest of the Edith Finch packs for their family house besides Barbara, giving me a huge new library of assets to work with finishing off the house. Here are some more shots as the house nears completion.

After this, work began a bit on expanding beyond the house to the street and landscape outside, with vehicles and streets with power poles and lights from 2 separate packs. (and a prefab house outline to serve for more backdrop)

now the main things getting in the way of development are an outdoor landscape with trees, and finishing the building story. In addition to all this, I was informed that my story ended up with a resemblance to the hit story game Gone Home, which has similar gameplay and story with similar themes. I've done a bit of research on Gone Home to provide a bit more in the way of ideas and inspiration, as I'm a bit stuck with where to take my own story at the moment.

[callieami]

Getting close to finishing the House, adding dynamic footstep sounds, and Saying hello to Megan...(and Countess too, I guess)

We started off this week by implementing footstep sounds for our character which change based on the material the player is stepping on. We started this by downloading a free footstep sound pack from Fab, the new asset library for Unreal Engine. We then converted these all into sound cues for us to play. Next we needed to create a Physical Material asset for each kind of material we have sound for, that we can then assign to corresponding static meshes.

Next, we went into the walk, run and end-jump animations for our character, and on each frame of a footfall, we added a notification that would activate a blueprint.

The blueprint would then perform a ray-cast line trace (similar to how we pick up Charlene the cube in our last project) to determine the physical material the player is stepping on in the current frame and then play the corresponding sound cue.

This sounded and worked great, and we moved onto something that I've been anticipating for a little while: Character models. For this we were unfortunately limited to Unreal Engine 4 Character models, as this project uses the Unreal Engine 4 3rd Person model as a base for rigging. For this we did have a decent asset pack, thankfully, and I can finally introduce you to our slightly generic-looking protagonist, Megan, properly for the first time!

(the model is called Sophie but we're going with the character name from my story). While she does look a bit boring, she more than serves her purpose, and it feels great to look down and see a real character model for once!

With this out of the way, we could get working on the house in earnest and add a lot more to the rooms, with Detail and new coloured wallpapers! They're pretty much finished, here's what they look like right now. Megan's former Bedroom:

Joel's former bedroom (still needs work):

The Bathroom/Laundry:

The Living Room/Kitchen:

Nate and Amelia's Bedroom:

The Spare Room is still unfinished. With the House coming closer to completion, I began to workout a plan for how the player progresses through the house using the Story Adventure template's key system.

These can each be assigned to open a door with a corresponding ID number and can open one or more doors (or none if you're cruel). with this I planned out the route that should be taken. The player now has to work their way around the house looking for keys to unlock some of the locked rooms (which are locked for actual story reasons too, not just gameplay), starting with the spare front door key, which is pretty much a freebie. Once in the house, the Bathroom Medicine Cabinet, Megan's old Room, Nate and Amelia's Room and the Spare Room are all locked. First the player needs to find the key to Megan's Room, which is sitting on a hook in the Kitchen. Once access to Megan's Room has been gained, the player needs to search her room to find the stolen Medicine Cabinet key, which is hidden with her Diary and the Diary extract note under her bed. The player then needs to proceed back downstairs to unlock the Medicine Cabinet, which contains the Emergency Key to Nate and Amelia's Room. Once in Nate and Amelia's room, the Player needs to find the final key to the Spare Room, which is currently sitting on Nate's bedside table, although I will probably make it harder to find some time soon. I plan for the Spare Room to have some sort of climax, although I haven't figured out what that is yet. In addition to all this, I have been using the Edith Finch packs along with Atmospheric House and adding new packs from Fab when needed. One pack that caught my eye on Fab for no particular reason was of Countess, a playable character from the game Paragon, which was the game we used assets from in our very first ever Unreal Engine level at the start of the semester, so things have come sort of full circle. She looks really cool and high quality, and has a full suite of animations, but unfortunately she does not work as a player character due to this project being set up for UE4 character rigs as mentioned above. Despite this, I want to include her in the project somehow, and have left her sitting in the Spare Room as a placeholder for whatever will eventually be there.

The next big phase is trying to finalize the story, as well as making an outdoor environment to place the House in. Things are really getting exciting!

[callieami]

BP_AudioObject, making working video screens, taking inspiration to build a house, and the surprise guest-appearance of Barbara Finch...

This post will cover work we did last week, and the next post will be this week. To start things off, we needed some more assets to go with the atmospheric house pack, and perfectly available were some free use environment packs on the Unreal Marketplace for aspiring developers from the hit story game What Remains of Edith Finch (which is an amazing game by the way). For now the only pack I used was the Barbara pack, which includes the assets and environment for the bedroom of washed up child film-star Barbara Finch, as well as the associated bunker for her little brother Walter Finch.

Before we went too far with work on the house with this, this new pack gave us a very nice flipclock asset mesh, which was perfect for our next item to add: a working radio/sound-emitting object. We downloaded some free Radio interference audio, and used it to create a sound cue, then in the blueprint created an interactable object that allowed us to toggle the sound on and off when clicking the object. We also messed with the sound cue to allow it to be muffled when heard through surfaces and walls for additional realism, and to allow it to be hidden and then found.

With this piece complete, I spent the next day beginning to design a House to explore with the Atmospheric House pack and the new Barbara pack, similar to the test in our first unit of the semester. I really liked the layout and many of the features of the original house I made previously, so I decided to take that design and iterate on it to make it even better. Shown below are some screenshots from the original House I made a few months back that I used for reference.

This was a good base to work from, but to give me more to work with, I slightly increased the footprint of the house in order to add a flight of stairs to a second floor.

This gave me a bit more space to work with and I now had a larger more defined layout, with the Bottom Floor consisting of an entranceway/central hallway, a combined Bathroom/Toilet/Laundry and a semi divided Living Room and Kitchen expanded from the Original, and the Top Floor consisting of a central hallway, two standard bedrooms (one of which replicating the original bedroom), a master bedroom, and a Spare room that I'm not sure what to do with. As I designed the rooms, I incorporated interactable items to discover as I went, and also had to design a few new furniture blueprints based on what I made last week, including kitchen cabinets and cupboards, the bathroom sink, bedside tables and wardrobes. The rooms slowly began to have more distinct personalities on their occupants as I continued and the story developed. At this point we once again paused the building of the house to add another new item: a working screen/video player. To begin this we downloaded some free TV Static footage from a site called Vecteezy, and then we had to follow some specific steps and create a number of special components.

First we converted the video to a media source asset, then we had to create a media player actor to load it up and convert it to a media texture. we then used the texture to create an emissive material (which gives off light), which we could then finally use in a blueprint to create a working television with a repeating static video that can emit light!

Work on the project is beginning to ramp up, and I can't wait to see how it turns out!

[callieami]

brief story overview so far for my untitled final project

keep in mind that this is just my idea for how things are going to go so far, and it will definitely change. Also if you're not my lecturer reading this and you want to play this yourself if that's ever an option, there's probably lots of spoilers in here if you care about that. The basic overview so far involves a young woman named Megan in her early 20's taking a break from her university degree to return to her family home (around an hour's drive from whichever city I pick at some point) to catch up with her parents, only to find no-one there when she arrives, forcing her to go through her old, now-empty house to investigate. While things initially appear normal, something strange has clearly happened. I haven't quite figured out what yet but it will definitely involve a locked room on the upper floor of the house, in which something dramatic is probably going to take place. Since a lot of the story I have made so far is in environmental storytelling, I think I should explain some of it in relation to all the characters that live in the house and the ideas I have for them so far. To make things simpler I will go from least to most important for these. Joel is Megan's younger brother (around 18-19), and he has just moved out of the house to pursue an arts degree at university around a month before the game, and while some of his things were left behind, most of them are gone, so we can't learn much about him beyond his interest in painting. Joel is overall the least important character in the story (at least right now I may do more with him) so for now I'll leave it there. Nate and Amelia are Megan and Joel's Parents, and while they are very important to the story, I haven't developed most of the stuff for them yet, so this may be brief. Amelia is the more fleshed out of the two, and largely seems to be a somewhat traditional wife/mother, who enjoys lifestyle magazines and baking, but has also suffered from a chronic health condition in the last few years that requires medication and suppliments. Nate does not have much yet, apart from having unpopular culinary tastes in breakfast spread, and liking coffee as evidenced by his favourite mug. I need to work a lot more on their backstory and what happened to them , as it is the major hook of the story currently. Megan (often reffered to as "Meg" for short by her family) is the oldest child of the family, but has always been a little closed-off. She's come back from her computer science degree in university to be here. From what evidence we can find, Megan really struggled as a teen from typical social problems and working through her sexuality as well as some mysterious medical issues that she kept from her family, and having to take a job at a local diner to help make ends meet. While many of these are no longer issues now, she has clearly repressed some parts which are more traumatic to her. This stuff is likely going to be relevant in the story but in what way I have not yet decided. Coming home evokes a lot of nostalgia for her, but things are not as they seem and her past may come back to haunt her... that's about all I have for now, hopefully I'll develop it more soon.

[callieami]

Getting Familiar with the First Person Story Adventure pack and combining it with more

For our final project of the year we are to create an interactive story game experience, which I know sounds pretentious but is the best way to describe it. The baseline for this project is the First Person Story Adventure pack, which gives us a bunch of game mechanics to work with that we can integrate into the game. While we broadly have any resources we can find at our disposal, we have once again been provided with the Atmospheric House pack to use as our primary resource for assets. Shown below is the FPSA pack's built-in showroom which shows off the mechanics, some of which I'll be displaying in this post.

The first feature we tested in our Demo Map were interactable objects, which featured a built in zoom with blur and an item description, and with relative ease, we could use their blueprint to make our own unique ones.

we also used a post-processing volume to add a highlight over any interactable object being hovered over by the mouse.

After these we set to work on some slightly higher challenges: Doors, cabinets and Drawers. With these we had to go into the blueprints to replace meshes, and edit some of the pivots on the house pack's meshes to fit, but thanks to the built in features, I soon had a pretty and functional door, fridge and dresser.

After this, we once again upped the ante with interactable lights and light switches which could connect to ceiling lights. this required a bit of coding and reparenting of blueprints, with the creation of a master light to categorize them, and a separate events graph each to allow them to be turned on and off during runtime. We did need to be careful during this process, as some of the child light blueprints had different settings to the master light before they were reparented to it so we had to change some things to ensure they didn't break. After all this, we had working interactive lights to go with our growing list of cool things to put in our project.

After this, we had a try at importing some custom textures onto some existing meshes. We did this by exporting the painting textures, taking them into Adobe Photoshop, and editing in some custom images onto them, before adding the new texture back into the game with great results, modelled here by the ever trusty (if a little braindead) Lydia from Skyrim.

with all of this at our disposal, along with some great assets, I'm more excited for where this project goes than ever before!